Bio—George Selley (born 1993) is a London based photographer, filmmaker & researcher. George currently teaches photography at Fine Arts College, in Camden. He is a recent graduate of MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. His work has been published in Dazed, Huck, The British Journal of Photography, Artpress and Fisheye Magazine, among others.

Last year George received the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Student Award 2017. He was also a finalist in the Felix Schoeller Best Emerging Photographer Award 2017. He has been exhibited in Germany; France; Italy; Spain; Poland; Ukraine, the Netherlands; the U.S and the UK. His 2015 documentaryStudy Drugs was selected and screened at the 2015 American Public Health Association Film Festival, in Chicago. George is a co-founder of the Carte Blanche Collective, and a member of Inpro.

A Study of
Assassination

Created through the Homesession Artist Residency Award, 2018.

In
1997, as part of the freedom of information act, a document was released by the
CIA entitled “A Study of Assassination.” The document was undated and unsigned
but had an estimated original publication date of 1953. The manual was released
as part of a collection of Central Intelligence Agency files relating to the Guatemalan Destabilization Programme.
The programme aimed to overthrow the newly democratically elected leader of
Guatemala, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had announced large scale land
reforms. At that time, the largest land owner in Guatemala by far (and indeed
Central America generally) was the US global corporation, The United Fruit
Company. United Fruit - called the “Octopus” by Guatemalans - wielded massive
power at the time, reaching its tentacle like arms deep into railroads, ports,
shipping and especially banana plantations. In total United Fruit owned one
fifth of the entire country, and almost solely controlled the worlds sale of
bananas. Arbenz proposed to buy back much of United Fruits land (90% of which
it didn’t use). With
the help of Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays – the “father of PR”, and
the CIA, United Fruit began an extremely effective global PR campaign to frame
the Guatemalan leader Arbenz as a communist, and nothing more than a soviet
puppet. Eisenhower, president at the time, had deep financial ties with United
Fruit, and Alan Dulles, director of the CIA owned a law firm that negotiated
United Fruits business in the region.

In June 1954, an offensive consisting of
CIA trained mercenaries and CIA aerial support overthrew Arbenz, and instilled
exiled military dictator Carlos Castillos Armas as leader. The “Assassination
Manual” is believed to have been created in order to “educate” the mercenaries
in the “act of killing”. However, it is said that the mercenaries couldn’t make
sense of the manual – some thought it was a joke – and many were said to have
torn it up. After the operation, CIA Director Dulles said that the country had
been saved from “communist Imperialism” and declared the addition of “a new and
glorious chapter to the already great tradition of the American States”. This
“success” lead to 31 years of repressive military rule and the deaths of more
than 100,000 Guatemalans, the country would not see stability again until 1990.
The “Octopus” increased its control and flourished in the region for decades. Dulles’s
predecessor at the CIA Walter Bedell Smith, would go on to become vice
president of United Fruit. Meanwhile,
in Europe and the US, United Fruit continued to mould the public perception of
the banana as a healthy, fun loving and innocent fruit, through mass
advertisement, music, and popular culture. This huge PR campaign was extremely
successful, and contributed to the bananas symbolic association with humour,
sex and liberation – associations that last, still to this day

This
project is broken into two sets of images. The first is concerned with
re-purposing the manual by way of photomontage. By combining pages of the document
with archival press images of the time; united fruit advertisement campaigns;
and cold war propaganda, the meaning of the documents is transformed.
Connotations commonly associated with the banana of humour, sex, liberation and
the American Dream are juxtaposed with its sinister history of oppression,
capitalist imperialism and genocide - challenging our conceptions of the
bananas symbolism. The document itself represents the bureaucracy of war, the everyday processes of a global
intelligence agency - the banality of power. Such documents seem to always have
an element of the absurd: a memo requesting a “delivery address for a heat
seeking missile system”; a leaked email advising covert agents to “buy
something at duty free”; a CIA “Assassination Manual” that begins: “assassination
will never be authorized by any US Headquarters”. After a while, one begins to
question their authenticity. It seems there’s almost a dry humour behind them. Playing
on these questions of fact, fiction and absurdity, while also referencing the
CIA’s tactics of misinformation - the
second set of images in the project are completely fictitious. Pairing documents from the manual and Guatemalan police reports with staged imagery and improvised documentary, they are the
result of the photographer following the Assassination
Manual, literally, with
his camera.